Each developer has it's "toy" project; one of mine is a small sequencer that is used mainly by players of a MMORPG (ClanLord) it as a text-based syntax, but can make many interesting things, like loops with alternate endings etc. A "toy" project is usualy the first victim when the developer wants to try new stuff (in this instance it's the integration of cocoa and C++, for the technicaly minded)
Anyway, I've just released a new version that I rewrote completely for OS X; it supports CoreMIDi and CoreAudio and I think is a good platform for a beginner. In fact, in all it's years of existence, a few people have 1) started composing using it, and are now quite good at it 2) dropped their studies to take music instead!
So it cant be all bad! :-)
You can download the new version
here or the old one (works on OSX & OS9)
here